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I am having huge issues shifting my character tendency to white....
I can't find anything on the web about it

never stumbled acrosshttp://demonssouls.wikidot.com/
?
I would have had no idea how a lot of stuff works without it since the game fails to give even small hints. Explains pretty much anything very good.

Iirc you better do the black tendency stuff first since white tendency is preferable on your later playthroughs due to its influence on difficulty.

going for Platinum...?
Have fun grinding for the pure Bladestone.
You better love the Black Skeleton fight in 4-2.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JLB1987

started Vanquish on hard mode. Stuck on the argus core. This game is rock hard.

Try challenge mode for real rock hard.
I'd said farewell to Vanquish's Platinum in a matter of seconds.

I was thinking on getting Far Cry 3, but I hear more and more negatives, hence I'll wait until it drops further in price. I'm still not feeling the urge to play more, at least I have internet again and by that my steam list of games. I could work on my back-catalogue. But I have no clear idea where to start.

The storyline leaves a lot to be desired, but the open world with its sandbox gameplay keeps it interesting. I've really enjoying the game on PC, with its lush graphics and strategic camp battles. I only paid $40 for the title and feel that the price is about right for what the game has to offer. I certainly feel that the single player campaign is much better than the very linear offerings of Black Ops II, that I pretty much bought for online play.

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Thanks! I'm currently watching Doctor Who to prepare for the culture shock (yes, I'm heading for the British Isles )

Good luck on the move. It's always exciting and stressful moving to a new local.

I stand by my judgement that Dark is the better game. Demon's has a lot of game mechanisms that don't really work. Prime example the tendency system, which is completely screwed up the second you go online. But since the online component is such a great part of the game you essentially have to decide if you want to complete the game with everything it has to offer (by playing offline), or have fun with the online component and hope that one day they'll do a black or white tendency event, so that you can finally see all parts of the level.

Exploring the levels is also much more fun in Dark, thanks to the addition of jumping. In Demon's it was only possible to take certain shortcuts at certain parts of a level. In Dark you can circumvent e.g. large parts of the castle in Anor Londo with a well-timed jump. Also melee and magic are better balanced in Dark. More importantly: in Dark the character is much quicker on ladders and can slide down ladders. This gameplay change alone is already worth all the praise in the world once you go through the game a second or third time

Demon's has some wonderful levels and I think some of the level design is stronger than in Dark. Especially the Tower of Latria, which I consider one of the best levels in any video game ever made. Dark has some sections that are oddly "empty" at times and is less diverse in terms of levels. On the other hand: Dark has better boss fights, especially the ones from the DLC (Kalameet, Artorias, Manus) are amazing. A surprising number of bossfights in Demon's are a bit gimmicky.

Hence, overall I think Dark is the better game. The game mechanics are just a bit more polished overall and don't counteract each other like in some cases in Demon's.

That's a great rebuttal and is well argued. I am pretty much the opposite of you - for me it's all about the world-building and the level design. I'm playing through at the moment with the brightness turned up, and am seeing some of the things the level designers put in place that make me laugh; it's a wonderful piece of work.

I admit I am not a fan of boss fights, and it's a plus for me that Demon's allows you many different approaches in comparison to Dark (though I may be misremembering). I think the designers learned a lot - look at Ornstein & Smough compared to the similar but much more simplistic Maneater(s). The big thing for me is that I can 'cheese' some bosses if I feel like it - I am basically Poison Clouding my way through the harder bosses now. Compare that to Dark, where I am stuck on bloody Artorias in NG++.....but I accept that the bosses are better from a pure gameplay/challenge perspective in Dark.

You should do the Platinums in both - it really adds another level of....not subtlety, but something.

never stumbled acrosshttp://demonssouls.wikidot.com/
?
I would have had no idea how a lot of stuff works without it since the game fails to give even small hints. Explains pretty much anything very good.

Iirc you better do the black tendency stuff first since white tendency is preferable on your later playthroughs due to its influence on difficulty.

going for Platinum...?
Have fun grinding for the pure Bladestone.
You better love the Black Skeleton fight in 4-2.

Sure, but my issue is that the Wiki says that I can kill the Black Phantoms via the coward's means of bow and arrow, but my character tendency in the game does not change when I do this, so I'm thinking they patched that out, or I'm doing something wrong. Internet searches are no help as all the keywords can easily refer to something else!

I have no issues with the World Tendency; I just picked up the Magic Sword Makoto which was my last White World event; now it is back to getting Black World so that I can fight the Phantoms....again.

It took me about a year to get the Pure Bladestone...and then that skeleton dropped two - one after the other! 4-2 is definitely my least favourite level now...

To get the Platinum I still need three upgraded weapons (eg marrowstone etc), seven spells (meaning 1.5 more playthroughs as they require common souls to give Freke and Yuria), and the Warrior's Ring (Doran), Foe's Ring (Mephistopheles) and Friend's Ring (The Monumental). The Friend's ring is taking a massive effort and I am no closer to it than I was last week...

Started Uncharted 3. And I might end it quite soon. I really enjoyed Uncharted 2 but with 3 I don't get along well. One problem is that I almost feel like a 'disturbance' within the otherwise wonderfully choreographed set-pieces that make up U3 and are held together with a (very) loose string which might be called "plot". Don't get me started on the staggering amount of areas where I'm forced to walk slowly because of forced, unskippable exposition. U2 just felt more like a whole and not like a loosely connected number of set-pieces. I also remember it funnier than it's successor. Another problem for me is that they changed how recoil works, which makes me feel like I'm much less in control of the shooting than I was in U2. Close combat also feels more like a series of QTE rather than... well, combat. I'm a bit disappointed. On the plus side it's apparently much shorter than U2, so I ponder if I should swallow the blue pill and try to push through.

Quote:

Originally Posted by gamevet

Good luck on the move.

Thanks!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pedro

You should do the Platinums in both - it really adds another level of....not subtlety, but something.

I don't care enough about trophies or achievements that I'd have ever considered "to platinum" a game

I agree, trophies are entirely meaningless. What I was trying to get at is there is a whole extra game within the game there, which makes you engage with the intricacies of the Souls worlds, and is really rewarding (your mileage may vary).

For example, in Dark, it makes you get to a certain level in some of the covenants, pushing you into a side of the game you may have ignored - think of all the individual challenges within the covenants. It pushes you towards completing the Onion Knight's questline, which if you were playing more casually, it is unlikely you would have seen.

It doesn't add subtlety, it adds intricacy, and I've found it to be a really rewarding aspect of the games. I don't have any other Platinums and don't intend to try.

It's really interesting how they managed to layer this meta game on top of everything else that has been so well thought out and is such a coherent world. There are many occasions when going for the Platinum that you set down the controller and marvel at the game design. It is that good. It is similar to the Level-1 Challenge that you did in Dark, I suppose, in that it makes you approach the game from different angles, and really shows you the depth and flavour of the games.

They did make a major blunder with the Pure Bladestone in Demon's though. That is the one sour note.

the Wiki says that I can kill the Black Phantoms via the coward's means of bow and arrow

I hardly ever used a bow, but i followed the instructions and everything worked, so if it actually says you can do it with a bow i doubt it has changed. The game was released for download last month but making it harder for lttp gamers? I don't think so.

The requirement list is not that complex or long.
Bosses were still alive when you killed the BPs?
shrug

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It took me about a year to get the Pure Bladestone...and then that skeleton dropped two - one after the other!

haha, great.

I actually still like the Black Skeleton. Definitely more than some of the rinse and repeat boss fights.

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The Friend's ring is taking a massive effort and I am no closer to it than I was last week...

I wonder how long some people played it to get the Platinum really on their own.
Just finding out how ANY tendency change works when the game hardly differs when its going one level up or down is a miracle to me.

playing now:
RE5 Gold
Single player just sucks. Coop is alright.
Really good was only the first additional mission of the Gold Edition.
Double Dragon Neon
Will get back to it after finishing RE5.
GT5
The combined load times will be insane after playing it for some time. But besides that it plays great so far.

Regarding Resident Evil 5, not played the DLC, but co-op in the main game is fun up until around the half way mark. I never got round to finishing it.

Had a bash at co-op on Rainbow Six Vegas with my partner. Christ, what a horrible experience. The game itself is fine (though in split screen, I assumed each person would get a team member to order around- no such luck, it's just us two). My woman had a hard time understanding this isn't L4D, and just kept running around. Frustrating, to say the least!

I hardly ever used a bow, but i followed the instructions and everything worked, so if it actually says you can do it with a bow i doubt it has changed. The game was released for download last month but making it harder for lttp gamers? I don't think so.

The requirement list is not that complex or long.
Bosses were still alive when you killed the BPs?
shrug

I've just confirmed that killing BPs with a bow does not affect your character tendency. You have to go toe-to-toe. I just killed BP Miralda through judicious use of the backstab and my character has moved towards white for the first time. Only 4 more to kill....I think I will leave Satsuki and Selen and just kill Rydell, Miralda and Scrvir over this game and the next!

How did you deal with BP Selen, by the way? She runs off into the swamp to heal, and you can't catch her because you're slowed down by the water. Because she has a sword that goes through shields, the only strategy is to dodge...I tried fighting her on that little sliver of land and as soon as I tried to dodge, I noticed the developers put a lot of little rocks there so that dodging is really hard - they interrupt the dodge. That is very sadistic.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JLB1987

My woman had a hard time understanding this isn't L4D, and just kept running around. Frustrating, to say the least!

Ha ha, my co-op partner is like this too - balls-out rampaging around, while I want to poke about in every nook and cranny. Can't imagine this style suits Rainbow 6 too well!

A combination of ranged attacks to get health a bit down and then the Dragon Bone Smasher to finish.
Very doable since the whole retry process takes not long if something goes wrong.

Probably also used the item combination for decreased own health but more attack power.

On the weekend tried again the Gamecube Remake of the original RE since i liked the mansion mission in RE5. (My RE history starts with RE4.)
I liked the control-wise similar Eternal Darkness at its time, but whenever i try RE- this was not the first time- i can't stand it longer than some minutes.
Atmosphere is good - much much better than RE5 with its stupid Moonraker-like overkill and also better than in RE4 -, but after getting killed three times and being clueless how to successfully fight with neither the knife nor the pistol and finding just a bunch of closed doors i gave up pretty much immediately.
A real remake could be great, when they get rid of the clumsy controls and maintain the small number of enemies.

I have a yearning for baseball, and OOTP 14 isn't out till April, so I've been playing a little of Road to the Show mode in The Show 12. My pitcher has an 8-1 record in Double A, with a 2.68 ERA. I'd got to 6-0 before I turned up the difficulty to hall of fame level so it's a bit more realistic now...still, it's a long slog to the big leagues.

Played DOTA 2 yesterday thanks to a beta invitation. I haven't played a moba before and the lack of a tutorial for the beta doesn't help when deciding with which of the 4 million playable characters I want to start with. I figured something that does damage is always nice, so I went with Firemage Lina.

I started a practice game versus easy bots and spent the first 5 or so minutes not acutally playing the game but figuring out how the shop works and what the standard items do. There are no health potions as such, but some kind of paste which allows to devour a tree for heal over time. I haven't heard of any kind of jam that would make eating a tree a tasty proposition, but who am I to judge the dietary requirements of fantasy heroes?

The next 10 minutes I spent deciphering the minimap. The term information overload sprang into my mind on several occasions. Way too late I charged into battle. Everyone else was already couple of levels higher than me and I found out quickly that the only way to get xp to gain levels from npc or other players (in my case bots) is to get the last hit on them when they die. Which sounds much easier than it actually is, since at least the character chosen by me had quite some delay for her standard attack and was turning with the agility and grace of a hippopotamus.

I also figured out that a lower level character is akin to breakfast for a higher level nuker. Unfortunately I went through this experience only on the receiving end, but on multiple occasions.

Dazzled and confused I was hovering through the woods (firemages apparently don't walk) just to be almost eaten by some random hostile monsters standing around. I guess they're supposed to be cannon fodder and level-up material, but already posed quite a challenge for my little hippo. At the point where the level of everyone else was at least double of mine I was singled out and one-shotted every time I got close to the front lines and and quit.

It actually sounds like an amazing game, with infinite strategy and meta games to play (though perhaps it all comes down to one hero countering another, I dunno). I believe in PvP games, you 'draft' your team one at a time and there is even a lot of strategy in which heroes you pick at that stage and which you pick to counter your opponents' pick, or you end up with an unbalanced team, or one with a fatal flaw that will be exposed during the game.

I have to say the language used in describing games is pretty incomprehensible, and I don't think I really want to know what is going on. It's kind of like Blood Bowl in that regard for me - I'm afraid of getting too close.

I suppose the main issue with the game is that the players are complete assholes, to a man Obviously that is not 100% true, but it sounds like it comes close.

So, are you hooked!? I am guessing you will turn it on just to have another go, and then...

I bought myself a copy of UFC Undisputed 3, seeing as it is so cheap on eBay (brand new, just over £10 inc. P&P). After hearing nothing but bad things about most wrestling games that have been released over the past few years and giving up waiting for a truly great one to come out, I got this.

I'm really enjoying it so far. Pretty technical, as I expected. The create-a-character, whilst a lot "plainer" than the CAW found in the last WWE game I played (2008, I think)- in that this is a more serious sport, I guess, so no masks, make-up, or anything too ridiculous- is still pretty in-depth. After going through the most basic tutorials, I opted to make a middleweight boxer.

Still early, but the career is great fun. I have a win/lose ratio of 5/1, so I think I'm doing pretty well. Dodging and blocking are all of the utmost importance here, and I really like how complex it can be. Not to mention, there is a real weight behind your character's strikes. Pummelling someone in the face has never been so much fun.

Also purchased Army of Two to play in co-op. Hopefully we'll be giving that one a go tonight.